Not Really Excited for Next Gen?

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Started by kitler53, Dec 20, 2019, 02:18 PM

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Excited for next gen?

Legend

As a dev, I'm really really excited.

As a player, I'm also excited but not as much as last gen. PS5 and xbox series x so far have had poor showings. I expect that to change over the next 6 months, but right now it's all just so anticlimactic.


I'm not sure how I feel about ray tracing. It will enable a lot of things but for most AAA games, it doesn't do much. Ray traced shadows are great. Every game that can support them will support them. It'll feel like a solid upgrade for shadows since they can be per pixel and look great with area lights. Ray traced reflections are less important, but towards the end of the gen I could see them being in high demand as well. The problem is that screen space reflections are just so cheap and look good enough 90% of the time. A flat mirror sucks with them but water and metal look fine. Currently people don't notice how wrong they are. Later on once people are used to ray traced reflections, I could see that changing. Ray traced global illumination is both the best and worst feature. It can make dynamic scenes look amazing and is something I'm very interested in with The Forged Kingdoms. At the same time though, 99% of AAA games already look that good because they render global illumination offline for static scenes.

Variable rate shading is another next gen thing being talked about. In simple terms it is localized checkerboard rendering. A triangle is drawn at full res but the colors inside the triangle are calculated for only some of the pixels. VRS will be amazing for VR. Center of the screen can be rendered with full sampling while the rest can use less and less sampling along the edges. For 2D however, and I might end up eating my words, I think it is mostly meh. It can be great for dynamic resolution effects where less important objects drop in quality first and it can be great for fast moving objects that will be a blur anyway, but for a general performance boost I don't really view it as a major selling point for gamers.

Backwards compat is one of the things I'm looking forward to the most lol. I skipped xbox one and I need to play those games!

Halo Infinite had a great reveal so I'm hoping it is good. I am sadly not expecting that.